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March 22, 2004
LIFE IMITATES ART
I was lucky enough in high school to be in a great play -- Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," a brilliantly satirical retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of two befuddled minor characters. Almost 20 years later, I still list it among the funniest and most well-written plays I've ever seen or read. If you ever have a chance to see a production of it, even on a high school level, I can't recommend it strongly enough.
Anyway, I've been thinking back to that play today. See, watching the Bush White House try and attack the credibility of Richard Clarke -- like they've tried to attack the credibility of David Kay, Hans Blix, Paul O'Neill, Mohamed el Baradei, and so many others before them who've revealed the true agenda of this administration... well, it's reminded me of one of the soliloquies I had to memorize all those years ago as Guildenstern. The two main characters are trying to make sense of their situation, trying to figure out if they're really experiencing what they think they're experiencing...
A man breaking his journey between one place and another, at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. This in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mythical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until -- "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming. I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Reality is the name we give the common experience... and there are enough witnesses now who have revealed Bush's true agenda and deception about his intentions that it now qualifies as a common experience.
